Contents

SELinux Guide

Contributions are welcomed!

Documentation Summary:

Purpose: How to accomplish specific tasks with SELinux in the desktop environment. This requires a major expansion of the content beyond the SELinux FAQ which will be amalgamated into this guide in use case scenarios.

A user who finishes reading this guide should be able to:

Understand how the Linux kernel, policy, and user tools work together to implement SELinux in Fedora

Understand the differences and interactions between legacy UNIX access controls and SELinux

Determine, set, and understand the operational mode of SELinux in a Fedora system

Determine, set, and understand object and file labels

Understand how to perform an automatic relabeling of a file system

Audience: Individuals who are unfamiliar with SELinux and who need to learn how to function in an environment with SELinux enabled.

Approach: This document explains basic principles by explaining one principle at a time. The document assumes some familiarity with Linux/UNIX-specific terminology or concepts. Functionality is also compared, where appropriate, to what the reader may know from other OSes, particularly Microsoft Windows.

Assumptions: The reader has a standard Desktop class installation of Fedora with, including a user account with the default settings. The reader does have access to the root password. (We changed this "non-root access" assumption so that we can include more coverage of regular software updates and the installation of alternate packages and desktops.)